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Since the close of the Cold War, the international community has created a variety of legal institutions designed to step in when state justice systems fail to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The ad hoc criminal tribunals, the hybrid tribunals (such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the use of universal jurisdiction by national courts are among a new generation of courtly mechanisms designed to hold wrongdoers criminally accountable, state justice systems notwithstanding. These mechanisms represent an era of international judicial involvement in what used to be a more exclusively sovereign matter—the response to mass crimes against civilian populations. Accordingly, they have engendered a slew of scholarship devoted to analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, individually and as a group.

Most criminal law defenses serve the criminal law’s goal of shielding blameless defendants from liability. Justification defenses, such as selfdefense and law enforcement authority, exculpate on the ground that the defendant’s conduct, on balance, does not violate a societal norm. Excuse defenses, such as insanity and duress, exculpate on the ground that, while the defendant may well have violated a societal norm, it was done blamelessly. That is, it is the excusing conditions, not the defendant, that is to blame. In contrast, a third group of general defenses, which have been called “non-exculpatory defenses,” bar liability in instances where the defendant may have clearly violated a societal norm with full blameworthiness yet nonetheless is exempt from criminal liability because giving the exemption advances some societal interest independent of—and in conflict with—the criminal law’s goal of imposing deserved punishment in proportion to an offender’s blameworthiness. Non-exculpatory defenses openly sacrifice doing justice in order to promote the competing non-justice interest. A wide variety of non-exculpatory defenses are commonly recognized, including, for example, statutes of limitation, executive and legislative immunities, double jeopardy, diplomatic immunity, and the doctrines of the legality principle. Each of these defenses let blameworthy offenders go free even for serious crimes because such restraint promotes or protects some non-desert societal interest. Our examination of the doctrines suggests, however, that those balances of competing interests are commonly misaligned. This occurs in some instances because societal circumstances have significantly changed since the initial formulation of the defense, without any corresponding revision of the doctrine. In other instances, there is reason to suspect that no thoughtful balancing of the competing interests ever took place, perhaps because at the time there was insufficient appreciation of the practical importance of doing justice and the societal costs of regular failures of justice. In this article, we illustrate the problem by examining the three most commonly used non-exculpatory defenses: statutes of limitation, the double jeopardy rule, and the legality principle’s rule of strict construction. We acknowledge that each of these defenses was created to promote or protect an important societal interest. But we show that in each instance the societal circumstances have changed, altering the balance of competing interests, yet the formulation of the doctrines has not been adjusted accordingly. Our larger conclusion is that non-exculpatory defenses, based as they are upon a balance of competing societal interests, rather than principles of societal harm and personal blameworthiness, require constant re-examination and adjustment in ways that justification and excuse defenses do not.

Our current understanding of the role of the social environment in crime causation is at best rudimentary. Guided by the theoretical framework of Situational Action Theory, and using data from the ESRC financed Peterborough Adolescent and Young Adult Development Study (PADS+), this paper aims to propose how we can better theorise and study the role of the social environment, particularly the person and place interaction, in crime causation. We will introduce, and illustrate the usefulness of, a space—time budget methodology as a means of capturing people's exposure to settings and describing their activity fields. We will suggest and demonstrate that, combined with a small area community survey and psychometric measures of individual characteristics, a space—time budget is a powerful tool for advancing our knowledge about the role of the social environment, and its interaction with people's crime propensity, in crime causation. Our unique data allows us to study the convergence in time and space of crime propensity, criminogenic exposure and crime events. As far as we are aware, such an analysis has never before been carried out. The findings show that there are (a) clear associations between young people's activity fields and their exposure to criminogenic settings, (b) clear associations between their exposure to criminogenic settings and their crime involvement, and, crucially, (c) that the influence of criminogenic exposure depends on a person's crime propensity. Having a crime-averse morality and strong ability to exercise self-control appears to make young people practically situationally immune to the influences of criminogenic settings, while having a crime-prone morality and poor ability to exercise self-control appears to make young people situationally vulnerable to the influences of criminogenic settings.

Folley explains the availability of tolling in a presidential prosecution. There are strong practical considerations justifying the conclusion that the President is immune from compulsory criminal process while in office, although this remains an open and as-yet-untested question. With respect to tolling invoked to implement the policies and procedures of other federal law, while a court would have strong interests to point to in adopting a novel tolling rule to solve the statute of limitations problem addressed here, the fundamental principles of criminal statutes of limitation may likewise dictate that this remedy is unavailable.

Determining the characteristics of an unknown offender from details of a crime is at the heart of much crime fiction. Although it has roots in the inferences made by Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never provided empirical evidence for Holmes' inferences, or models of how such inferences can be made. Yet it ought to be possible to utilize psychological theories to derive inferences about offenders. This possibility has become a significant aspect of the new domain known as investigative psychology, which among other things seeks to establish what are called \"profiling equations.\" Although these are not equations in the literal, mathematical sense, they serve to summarize the search for consistent associations between aspects of a crime and features of the criminal that will be useful to investigations. Some progress has been made in modeling the process for establishing these links, elucidating consistencies in human actions often ignored in studies of individual differences.

The Iowa legislature eliminated the criminal statute of limitations for minor sexual abuse claims in 2021. However, the Iowa legislature did not extend or eliminate the civil statute oflimitations for minor sexual abuse claims, leaving the statute of limitations at one year after the victim reaches eighteen. This short statute of limitations severely restricts victims from bringing claims. It also limits society's ability to identify perpetrators and protect potential future victims. This Note advocates for the elimination of the civil statute of limitations for minor sexual abuse claims in Iowa to afford adequate relief for victims throughout their adulthood. In the event that an elimination of the statute of limitations is too expansive, this Note also presents two proposals to extend the civil statute of limitations to either thirty-five or five years after the victim turns eighteen.

In recent years, researchers have argued that police actions should be focused on high-risk crime places rather than spread thinly across the urban landscape. This review examines the available evaluation evidence on the effects of concentrating police enforcement efforts on crime hot spots. Five randomized experiments and four nonequivalent control group quasi-experiments were identified. The findings of these evaluations suggest that focused police actions can prevent crime and disorder in crime hot spots. These studies also suggest that focused police actions at specific locations do not necessarily result in crime displacement. Unintended crime prevention benefits were also associated with the hot spots policing programs. Although these evaluations reveal that these programs work in preventing crime, additional research is needed to unravel other important policy-relevant issues such as community reaction to focused police enforcement efforts.